Composition, maintenance, and infrastructural conditions in residential towers

Abstract

In recent decades, residential towers have become the main technical catalogue to densify the downtown districts of Chilean cities. Based on ethnographic observations, this article describes the dimensions of these buildings’ internal governance, particularly the composition and maintenance that supports their persistence in urban environments. The conclusion is that these regimes are useful to deal with these types of buildings as socio-material collectives that articulate their own versions of technical democracy and present an infrastructural dimension configurable at an urban scale. Thus, the impacts as a typological set in the urban environment can be assessed, introducing architectural variables into urban governance.